Then it was all over.  ’Niram and Ev’leen Ann were married, and the rest of us were bustling about to serve the hot biscuit and coffee and chicken salad, and to dish up the ice-cream.  Afterward there were no citified refinements of cramming rice down the necks of the departing pair or tying placards to the carriage in which they went away.  Some of the men went out to the barn and hitched up for ’Niram, and we all went down to the gate to see them drive off.  They might have been going for one of their Sunday afternoon “buggy-rides” except for the wet eyes of the foolish women and girls who stood waving their hands in answer to the flutter of Ev’leen Ann’s handkerchief as the carriage went down the hill.

We had nothing to say to one another after they left, and began soberly to disperse to our respective vehicles.  But as I was getting into our car a new thought suddenly struck me.

“Why,” I cried, “I never thought of it before!  However in the world did old Mrs. Purdon know about Ev’leen Ann—­that night?”

Horace was pulling at the door, which was badly adjusted and shut hard.  He closed it with a vicious slam. “I told her,” he said crossly.

A SAINT’S HOURS

In the still cold before the sun
HER LAUDS Her brothers and her sisters small
She woke, and washed and dressed each one.

And through the morning hours all,
PRIME Singing above her broom, she stood
And swept the house from hall to hall.

At noon she ran with tidings good
TERCE Across the field and down the lane
To share them with the neighborhood.

Four miles she walked and home again,
SEXT To sit through half the afternoon
And hear a feeble crone complain;

But when she saw the frosty moon
NONES And lakes of shadow on the hill
Her maiden dreams grew bright as noon.

She threw her pitying apron frill
VESPERS Over a little trembling mouse
When the sleek cat yawned on the sill,

In the late hours and drowsy house. 
COMPLINE At last, too tired, beside her bed
She fell asleep ... her prayers half said.

IN MEMORY OF L.H.W.

He began life characteristically, depreciated and disparaged.  When he was a white, thin, big-headed baby, his mother, stripping the suds from her lean arms, used to inveigh to her neighbors against his existence.  “Wa’n’t it just like that do-less Lem Warren, not even to leave me foot-free when he died, but a baby coming!”

“Do-less,” in the language of our valley, means a combination of shiftless and impractical, particularly to be scorned.

Later, as he began to have some resemblance to the appearance he was to wear throughout life, her resentment at her marriage, which she considered the one mistake of her life, kept pace with his growth.  “Look at him!” she cried to anyone who would listen.  “Ain’t that Warren, all over?  Did any of my folks ever look so like a born fool?  Shut your mouth, for the Lord’s sake, Lem, and maybe you won’t scare folks quite so much.”